Twitter Launches Site Streams, No Rate Limits for Your Updates

Twitter has recently announced a beta service called Site Streams. The service is based on the new streaming API and working with OAuth

“Site Streams allows services, such as web sites or mobile push services, to receive real-time updates for a large number of users without any of the hassles of managing REST API rate limits”

as quoted from the Twitter API page.

Site Streams initially will not include User’s Home stream but will be able to deliver Direct Messages, Mentions, Favorites, Tweets, Retweets, Profile and List changes.

However there are also some limits to these services during beta period of Site Streams:

Applications are limited to a total of 100,000 simultaneous users during the beta period unless prior arrangements are made.

Keep your number of streams below 1,000.

Limit the follow count to 100 users per stream. Clients must occasionally compact users onto a smaller number of connections to minimize the total number of connections outstanding.

Open no more than 20 new connections per second and exponentially back-off on errors.

The initial impression of Site Streams service is as of a service that provides a way for websites and apps that let users sign in through OAuth, to quickly integrate a real-time flow of updates without watching anything in action. Site Streams looks like a competitor to Facebook widget that has become very famous on blogs, websites and major publishing sites.